Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — The United States has repatriated two Algerians held at the detention center at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for more than a decade, the Pentagon said yesterday, in what the men’s
attorneys described as an involuntary transfer that ignored their pleas to go elsewhere.

Djamel Ameziane and Belkecem Bensayah did not want to go back to Algeria because they fear
persecution there, their attorneys said.

“Hopefully, this won’t be a case of ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire,’” Zeke Johnson,
director of Amnesty International USA’s Security with Human Rights Campaign, said in a
statement.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented Ameziane, said the repatriation to
Algeria violated international law. Rob Kirsch, an attorney for Bensayah, described the transfer as
involuntary.

“The U.S. has compounded one injustice against him with another. He deserved better from the
United States,” the center’s attorney Wells Dixon in a statement.

The transfers reduced Guantanamo’s prisoner population to 162 detainees, part of a slow-moving
effort by President Barack Obama’s government to close the detention facility.

Obama promised to shut it down during his 2008 presidential campaign, citing its damage to the
U.S. reputation around the world. But he has been unable to do so in his nearly five years in
office, in part because of resistance from Congress.

Prior to the latest transfers, the United States has repatriated 14 detainees to Algeria, seven
under Obama and seven under former President George W. Bush’s administration, a Pentagon spokesman
said.

“We have received no credible or substantiated information to suggest that any of these former
detainees have been targeted by extremists operating in Algeria,” said Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a
Pentagon spokesman.

Both men fled civil-war-torn Algeria in the mid-1990s and had been held at Guantanamo since
2002. They were not charged with crimes.